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I try and have a balance of letting
something happen and control,
but the final stages become purely control.
— Angela Jarman
Angela Jarman worked with Colin Reid from 1993–5 while developing her wholly distinctive practise in lost-wax glass casting.
All the ideas for my work originate from a lifelong interest I have in biology and the natural world. I look to all sources for inspiration – animal, vegetable and mineral; but the one common theme that unites all my thinking has at its core ideas to do with growth and reproduction, duplication, decay and transformation.
Jarman’s work since 2015/16 has acquired a rich chromatic interest since her earlier preoccupation with opaque black and translucent ‘white’ glass, and is represented in A Thread of Light by works from her recent Geode series, using kiln-cast body colour with cold-working techniques of grinding and polishing. In this work her overtly organic sculptural language, eliding vegetable and mineral forms, explores a more formal geological interest around the vessel form. The Oxford English Dictionary defines geode as:
A rock body or nodule having an internal cavity lined or filled with mineral crystals growing inwards; esp. a hollow, rounded stone containing large or well-formed crystals and typically cut in half for display. Also: the cavity within such a body; the contents of such a cavity. Also in figurative contexts.
The figurative context or dimension of these pieces places them slightly beyond reach, glowing and unknowable, balancing ambiguously qualities of strange familiarity and ultimate resistance to assimilation. Mirrors that mirror not only what you see in them, and whose embodied obscurity in the glassy medium is perhaps precisely the point.
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